You Can’t Go Back Again: The Lazarus Project
Sky’s time-travel series balances existential dread and spy thriller
Sky Original series are a collection of curious beasts. There’s a regular flow of them, they’ve got sizeable production and marketing budgets, and yet they rarely seem to break through into popular consciousness in the way other series do. Sure, series on the old terrestrial channels get more attention, but they suffer in comparison to their Sky/HBO stablemates. You don’t see Riviera, Britannia or COBRA getting the critical attention and discussion of Succession, Game Of Thrones, or The Last Of Us.
Maybe if their marketing team could go back and try again they might do a better job this time? And that’s where The Lazarus Project comes in, starting with a simple enough SF question: what if there was a way to jump back time in the event of a civilisation-ending cataclysm? How would you use this power and what would be the effect of it?
Within the series, The Lazarus Project is a secret global organisation that has the power to reset the timeline, but within limits. Through lots of technobabble and handwaving about singularities, a “checkpoint” is created every July 1st, and at any point in the twelve months that follow, the timeline can be reset back to that checkpoint — but not before — until the next July…
